Covert hard drive fragmentation embeds a spy's secrets

GOOD news for spies. There is now a way to hide data on a hard drive without using encryption. Instead of using a cipher to scramble text, the method involves manipulating the location of data fragments.

The inventors say their method makes it possible to encode a 20-megabyte message on a 160-gigabyte portable hard drive. It hides data so well that its existence would be "unreasonably complex" to detect, they say.

Encryption should sometimes be avoided, says Hassan Khan at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, because the gobbledegook it creates is a dead giveaway: it shows someone might have something to hide. That could spell disaster for someone trying to smuggle information out of a repressive country.

So "steganography", hiding data in plain sight, is coming to the fore. Normally, data intended to be secret is added to the pixels in digital images, or used to change the transmission timing of internet packets. But these techniques are well known and easily detected, says Khan. So, with colleagues at the National University of Science and Technology in Islamabad, Pakistan, he has developed an alternative.

Their technique exploits the way hard drives store file data in numerous small chunks, called clusters. The operating system stores these clusters all over the disc, wherever there is free space between fragments of other files.

Khan and his colleagues have written software that ensures clusters of a file, rather than being positioned at the whim of the disc drive controller chip, as is usually the case, are positioned according to a code. All the person at the other end needs to know is which file's cluster positions have been encoded.

The code depends on whether sequential clusters in a file are situated adjacent to each other on the hard disc or not. If they are adjacent, this corresponds to a binary 1 in the secret message. If sequential clusters are stored in different places on the disc, this encodes a binary 0 (Computers and Security, DOI: 10.1016/j.cose.2010.10.005). The recipient then uses the same software to tell them the file's cluster positions, and hence the message. The researchers intend to make their software open source.

reference:http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028095.200-covert-hard-drive-fragmentation-embeds-a-spys-secrets.html

The making of the World's Biggest Pac-Man game

In about a week, Pac-Man fans have built more than 13,500 levels for the World's Biggest Pac-Man game. This Space Invaders-themed maze is just one of them.

(Credit: Namco-Bandai)

When we think of Pac-Man, we think of a single screen, and a series of new mazes that become available only after players finish the one they're on.
But that's not how Ashley Ringrose and his colleagues at Sydney, Australia-based Soap Creative agency thought of the mega-hit 30-year-old video game. So when they were given a chance to design a promotion for the game that was both innovative and social, the lightbulb that went off over their heads was all about big.
Big, as in the World's Biggest Pac-Man game, in which fans are able to design their own levels, all of which are connected with the others, and all of which can be shared with the world.
The new version of the game, unveiled to the world during a keynote address at Microsoft's Mix 11 event in Las Vegas, is a fan's view of what Pac-Man is. With 13,500 user-designed mazes created as of this writing, and nearly 300 million dots eaten, this is truly a worldwide phenomenon.
Ringrose and his colleagues came up with the idea in a flash--but they still had to get buy-in from Pac-Man publisher Namco-Bandai. And that came quickly, Ringrose said. Still, Namco had to weigh in with its perspectives on how its hit game would come across in this format.
Yesterday, I invited both Ringrose and Carlson Choi, vice president of marketing for Namco Bandai Games America, to have a discussion about the creation of the game as part of my 45 Minutes on IM interview series. The two spoke passionately about Pac-Man, and about what it takes to give a classic character a whole new way of interacting with the world.


Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20055884-52.html#ixzz1KAS3OlQN




reference:http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20055884-52.html?tag=topTechContentWrap;editorPicks

Photoshop Touch SDK brings first wave of more powerful iPad apps from Adobe

In a series of late-night press releases, Adobe pulled the veil off of Creative Suite 5.5, the latest update to its family of applications that of course includes top-shelf image editing program Photoshop. While the company previously made its own entry into the mobile space with Photoshop Express, the sorry little features-light editing app can’t compare to more powerful tools like Photogene or PhotoStudio HD. Today’s announcement still doesn’t bring full Photoshop functionality to mobile platforms, but it seems that we’re getting there with the three new, soon-to–be-released iPad apps that have been announced.
While none of them bring additional image editing functionality to Apple‘s tablet, the trio of announced apps are described in the press release as Adobe’s “initial Photoshop CS5 companion apps.” Initial. Meaning there’s more to come.
First is Adobe Color Lava, a color-mixing app that allows you to combine various colors using the iPad’s touchscreen. Sort of like a virtual painters’ palette. Next up is Adobe Eazel, a finger painting app which can effectively render the interaction between “wet” and “dry” paints. Creations can then be sent to Photoshop CS5 for additional editing. The press release offers no indication, but it stands to reason that some level of cross-app connectivity exists between the paint palettes created in Color Lava and the application of those paints in Eazel




reference:http://news.yahoo.com/s/digitaltrends/20110411/tc_digitaltrends/photoshoptouchsdkbringsfirstwaveofmorepowerfulipadappsfromadobe